Islam will fill Europe’s empty cradles

Giulio Meotti /// Demographers have coined an expression for when a country records more deaths than births: “Natural decrease”. An oxymoron that indicates the great demographic revolution that Europe is now facing. This is what emerges from a study published by the Population and Development Review, renowned academic journal of population studies, in which the authors, led by Kenneth Johnson of the University of New Hampshire, explain that there is no country in Europe that has natural growth today and increase in population comes only from immigration.

Analyzing data from 2000 to today, scholars say: “The deaths have exceeded births in most of the provinces of Germany, Sweden, Greece, Portugal and Italy”. It is Spain’s mystery, a country that until the 1970s had the highest fertility rate in Europe and is now lowest in the world. The last statistics sound like a death sentence for Spain: in 2015 there was a greater number of deaths than births. According to Alejandro Macarrón Larumbe, author of “El demographic suicide de España”, this is unprecedented since the civil war and the pandemic of 1918. In the first six months of this year, there were 206,656 births,17.4 percent of them by foreigners. The number of deaths was 225,924 in the first half of 2015, a record, 10.5 percent more than in 2014. Spain is dying.

We spoke with Nicholas Eberstadt, the American scholar considered one of the leading demographers of the world. “There have been many times where populations became extinct” says Eberstadt. “It happened due to natural disasters, diseases, epidemics, but now it is happening by choice. This is unprecedented. And this is because there is a new cultural priorità in Europe: not having children”.

Many demographers explain the demographic crisis as a result of the lack of aid to the family and the need for a welfare state: “It is false. How else can we explain this paradox: today there are more and more cars per capita, more and more holidays per capita, more and more material goods per capita, but fewer and fewer children per capita”.

Can a country like Italy, with a fertility rate of 1.3, return to growth? “No, the low fertility continues, it cannot reverse itself, it becomes a given condition. What we are living through is unprecedented. We witness the birth of a Europe which will attract more and more immigrants”.

Europe will facilitate the arrival of 20 million immigrants. Then this demographic revolution will be completed and Islam will fill our empty cradles.